The aim of this study is to examine how work at music departments in public libraries has changed with time. To analyze this, the role of music libraries as well as music library users, selection, holdings, acquisition and technological development have been examined. The examined data consists of qualitative interviews with music librarians and library assistants at public libraries in Sweden. To get a time perspective, handbooks and articles about music departments in libraries have also been analyzed. This study emanates from Sanna Talja’s discourse analysis of music libraries in Finland. In her study of Finnish music libraries she has found three discourses that give the library different roles in society. The first discourse, The General Education Repertoire, states that the role of the music library is to educate the citizens by supplying a broad record collection with “classics” from all kinds of genres. The second discourse, The Alternative Repertoire, states that the role of the library is to be an alternative to commercial music and the record industry by providing alternative music, that can’t be found everywhere. The third discourse, The Demand Repertoire, states that the role of the library is to satisfy the library users’ needs and thus adapt the collection and acquisitions to the local demand. The study shows that all three discourses are present at the public libraries examined in this master’s thesis. My interviewees state that they want to offer a broad collection with all genres represented but they find it also important to provide alternative music that is difficult to find elsewhere. At the same time, a demand repertoire, where the collection is more adapted to users’ wishes and needs, gets more common and librarians have a less critical attitude towards certain genres that were formerly banned at public libraries. The study also shows that work at public libraries has changed a lot with time. The music departments started with only listening service, began later to loan their music collections to the users and now even provide music files that can be downloaded and played on mp3-players. Loan figures of phonograms remain high, but have started to drop, which can partly be due to downloading and the fact that the number of young music library users, such as adolescents, has gone down. The technological development has also changed work at the music library, among other things information research, acquisition and selection. Even though technological development has changed the work and tasks at music libraries, the role of the librarian is still quite the same. An important task still is to search for and provide information even though the strategies and facilities are different.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-105851 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Thegel, Esther |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för ABM |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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